Folktales

I noticed a couple of interesting things about the folktales that we read for Monday. The first thing I noticed was the repeated theme of the black slaves being able to fly away from their troubles. I had also noticed this with the songs that we looked at last week. I think this is of huge importance to the slaves that were singing the songs or telling the folktales. To them the idea of flying away (by either dying or running away) might have been one of the few hopes that they could cling to. Looking at these readings really drove that home to me.
The other thing that I noticed was a bit of a surprise to me. I had expected many of the folktales to talk about white men tricking, abusing, and trying to destroy their black slaves or the slaves outsmarting and tricking their masters. This was the theme of most of the folktales, but a couple of the stories seemed to say that it was the slaves' own faults that they were slaves. For example, the story where the black man choose to open the larger bag full of tools while the white man got a smaller bag with a pen and ink in it. The black man was forced to do the manual work while the white man could "figure". This really surprised me because I hadn't expected to see it.